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Disclosure

Reading a results page

Every vendor shows performance. What separates them is which parts they show when the numbers are unflattering — and that is a question you can answer from the page itself, without trusting any of the figures on it.

What follows is about which fields should be present, never about what their values should be. No page on this site publishes a performance figure.

  1. 01Maximum drawdown, beside the profit

    decisive

    The worst peak-to-trough fall the account went through. A profit figure without it tells you where a strategy ended up and hides what holding it felt like — and the second thing is what decides whether a real person was still in the trade at the end. If a page shows one number, it should be this one, and if it shows only profit you cannot evaluate the record at all.

  2. 02Largest single loss

    serious

    Drawdown can accumulate over weeks; the largest loss tells you what a single bad day looks like. The two together describe the shape of the risk in a way an average never will, and averages are what most results pages lead with.

  3. 03Backtested records labelled as backtests

    decisive

    A backtest is a strategy's performance against history it already knows, with assumed fills and modelled slippage. That is legitimate information and a normal part of development. Presenting it in the same list as executed orders, with nothing distinguishing them, makes a record look substantially better than it is.

  4. 04The period, and how many trades

    serious

    A record over a short window or a small number of trades is not evidence of much, however good it looks. Both numbers should be visible without asking, because both determine how much weight the rest of the page can carry.

  5. 05The vendor's own caveat

    worth noting

    A plain statement that past performance does not guarantee future results, and — where backtests appear — that simulated results may differ from live ones because of fills, slippage and market conditions. A seller writing down the reasons to discount its own numbers is doing something most do not.

  6. 06Whether you can see it before registering

    worth noting

    Some vendors put results behind a sign-in. That is a real cost to a buyer trying to evaluate before committing, though it is not evidence of anything by itself — plenty of legitimate products do it, and per-strategy detail is genuinely more useful than a public summary would be. Worth knowing, not worth panicking about.

What good disclosure does not prove

A vendor publishing drawdown, largest loss, labelled backtests and its own caveat is behaving well. That is a genuine finding and it is worth crediting. It is not a prediction — a track record is evidence about what has happened, and no quantity of it establishes what happens next.

Read a well-disclosed record for what it is: a reason to trust the seller’s reporting, not a reason to expect the same numbers yourself.

The seven vendor checks

Questions

What is the most important number on a trading results page?

Maximum drawdown, published beside the profit. Profit alone tells you where the strategy ended up and hides how far the account fell along the way — and that fall is what determines whether a real person would still have been holding at the end.

Are backtested results worthless?

No, but they are a weaker claim than live execution, because a backtest measures a strategy against history it already knows with assumed fills. They are useful when labelled. The problem is a results page that mixes them with executed orders and leaves you unable to tell which is which.

Is a results page behind a login a warning sign?

Not on its own. It is a genuine inconvenience if you are trying to evaluate before registering, and plenty of legitimate vendors do it because per-strategy detail is more useful than a public summary. Judge it alongside everything else rather than as a verdict.

If a vendor discloses everything properly, is the strategy good?

It means the record is disclosed honestly, which is a real finding about how the business behaves. It is not a claim that the strategy will work. Good disclosure and good performance are separate things, and only the first one can be established by reading a page.